10: A Sunken Mystery Structure About 30ft (9m) beneath the Sea of
Galilee in Israel, there is a mysterious, circular structure around the size of a Boeing 747 jet. Not
only is it in the middle of nowhere, but it's also on the bottom of the sea. It was first discovered
by scientists in 2003 totally by accident. Researchers from Tel Aviv University bumped
into it while doing a sonar survey of the ocean floor. They noticed a large lump of something
manmade rising off the otherwise flat seabed. The structure appears to be built of basalt rocks,
over 230ft (70m) at the base and 32ft (9.8m) tall. They believe the structure probably weighs
somewhere around 50,000 tons (54.431t), making it twice as large as Stonehenge in England.
Once the team realized they were dealing with an archaeological wonder, they went diving to
see it for themselves. But even all these years later, after scans and physical excavations,
nobody knows what the mysterious structure is. Some have guessed it could be a primitive
underwater nursery, built by ancient people to give them a healthy and consistent supply of fish.
But other researchers, like geophysicist Shmuel Marco, believe the structure was probably built
on dry land. Then, many years later, the lake rose to swallow it. It could have been a temple, it may
have been a large housing structure – nobody has any clue. Nobody even knows how old this thing is!
Estimates range anywhere from 2000 to 12,000 years old. Has anyone here actually been to Stonehenge?
Tell me about it in the comments. 9: The Gungywamp Structures
The Gungywamp in Connecticut can be found in the middle of the woods. It's an ancient place that
was first occupied by Native Americans living in the woodland, then by colonists in the early days
of the New World. The foundations of rock houses, barns, and root cellars can still be found here.
Archaeologists have also discovered ancient artifacts left behind by the Native Americans,
things such as stone tools and shards of pottery. The discoveries here aren't particularly new. Back
in November of 1654, colonial settler John Pynchon described coming across a strange array of stone
walls and crumbling structures in the middle of the forest. They had once been occupied by natives
but were abandoned for unknown reasons. Their discovery came at around the same time when Native
Americans still had huge wooden forts throughout Connecticut, built with massive pieces of timber.
And while most of those fortresses have been destroyed and replaced by modern cities,
the stone structures at Gungywamp stand just as they had centuries ago.
Their unusual stone chambers dug into the ground, retaining walls crumbled away to
nothing, stone bridges that don't seem to serve any purpose, and even mysterious standing stones.
But the whole place is a mystery because there hasn't been much archaeological work done.
Nothing's ever been renovated, there have been almost no excavations, and nobody is doing any
preservation work. Weather and time have pretty much destroyed this place. We don’t know which
tribe lived here, how long ago the structures were occupied, or why the natives left. Should places
like this be preserved? Tell me in the comments! 8: The Desert City of Ma’rib
Ma’rib was once the capital of the great Kingdom of Saba, which ruled South Arabia and huge swaths
of the Arabian Desert. They built their great city in the middle of absolute nowhere, at the foot of
the Sarawat Mountains. Depending on which scholar you ask, Ma’rib was the heart of the Kingdom of
Sheba, although no real proof has ever been found. The issue with the Kingdom of Sheba is that the
ruins of its legendary capital are said to be in several other places: Sudan, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
What we know for sure is that Ma’rib belonged to the Sabaeans, and it was originally founded
sometime around 1200 BC. The city became a center for trade because it was along many different
caravan routes, linking various societies in the Arabian Peninsula with the civilizations of the
Mediterranean. Extremely important commodities such as frankincense and myrrh could only move
through Ma’rib, giving them a monopoly. Today, you would have to be crazy to go
in search of this desert capital. It was built around an oasis, but that oasis has long gone
dry. The whole region is a wasteland, with the withered buildings slowly sinking into the sand.
Thousands of years ago, Ma’rib was a paradise. They built a great dam in the 8th century BC
that captured monsoon rains coming down the nearby mountains and irrigated the land around the city.
They built a lush, green paradise for themselves, though all traces of that splendor are now gone.
7: Mauritius Square Mauritius Square is an ancient archaeological
site in Ukraine that looks like a giant crab or spider, depending on which way your imagination
goes. The square itself is a mysterious structure located near the modern village of Mezhirichi,
far from ordinary society in the middle of the country. It's a kind of earthwork,
constructed from mounds of dirt. But nobody knows what it was ever used for. In the middle of the
structure is a massive circle with one deep basin going in through its center. There are
three openings cut into the walls of this circle, leading north, east, and south. On the ground, it
looks like a rough clump of hillocks. But from the air, it was clearly built with something in mind.
It looks like it has arms and legs, and is altogether about 820ft (250m) long.
The site was originally identified in 1987. But it wasn't until 2001 that a group of researchers
flew over the site using hang gliders and saw what it looked like from the sky.
It was the Ukrainian equivalent of discovering the Nazca Lines in Peru, something very amazing
that can only truly be appreciated from above. Excavations in 2004 revealed five burial grounds
within the structure. They all date from near the end of the fourth millennium BC.
Analyzing the skeletons found in the burials, researchers were able to determine them to be
of Indo-European descent. Putting all these pieces together, archaeologists believe the locals built
Mauritius Square nearly 5000 years ago. They used it as an open-air temple that doubled as an
astronomical observatory. They very well may have also used this place for ritual sacrifices, though
that's yet to be confirmed. What do you think it could have been for? Let me know your theories!
6: The Isolated Ruins of Nan Madol There are no ruins on Earth quite as
isolated as Nan Madol. This ancient city was abandoned centuries ago in a lagoon
near the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia. Thats PON-pei not POM-pei just in case.
It's located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and almost impossible to get to.
But 1000 years ago, it was a political and ceremonial center,
ruled by the chiefs of the powerful Sau Deleur Dynasty. They constructed a great complex of over
100 artificial islands spread across 200 acres. Nan Madol is the only ancient city in the entire
world that was built on a coral reef. It housed roughly 1000 people inside primitive structures
of basalt and coral rock. Construction continued from around 1100 AD until the 17th century, with
somewhere around 750,000 tons (686,388t)resting on the artificial structures in the lagoon.
Here's where the numbers start to get confusing. According to archaeologist Rufino Mauricio,
the people of Pohnpei needed to move roughly 2000 tons (1,814t) of basalt rock every year
for 400 years consecutively to create Nan Madol. Nobody has any clue how they did it.
The quarries where the rock came from are over 25 miles (40km) from the foundations of the city.
They would have needed a complicated system of ropes and levers just to get them there.
Then there was the building of the city, which was even more of a feat. This included dwellings,
crypts, ceremonial sites, and so much more. The Sau Deleurs were defeated in battle by the
hero Isokelekel, who divided the land into three ruling chieftainships. They formed a
decentralized ruling system called Nahnmwarki, which they still use today. However, Nan Madol
was abandoned by the 1800s and has remained that way ever since. How do you think ancient
civilizations moved and stacked such heavy stones? If you have a theory leave it in the comments.
5: The House of Bones Deep in the middle of the Russian wilderness,
far from any major road, archaeologists discovered a structure from the Ice Age built
entirely of bones. It's one of the most baffling and jaw-dropping ancient structures on the globe.
It was once an enormous temple-like building built from the grisly remains of over 60 wooly mammoths.
Even more amazing is that it was built about 25,000 years ago
before any human had ever even built a house. Don't you think a house would be more useful?
According to archaeologist Alexander Pryor, a significant amount of time went into building
the structure, which was about 40ft (12m) in diameter. Yet nobody has a clue why it was
erected in the first place. Archaeologists have found evidence of fires that once burned inside
the structure. It could have been used as a food processing and food storage facility. Or it may
have had some kind of ritual element. The truth is that nobody knows and that nothing else like it
has ever been found. In the middle of the Siberian wasteland, over 20,000 years before Stonehenge was
built in England, a group of hunter-gatherers put together a megalithic structure of solid
wooly mammoth bones for totally unknown reasons. What do you think the mysterious house of mammoth
bones was used for? Let me know in the comments and remember to subscribe if you haven’t already!
4: Koi Krylgan Koi Krylgan can be found in modern-day Uzbekistan,
an archaeological site in the middle of nowhere. It was originally constructed around
400 BC as a ceremonial center for the Afrighids Dynasty. This was an ancient group of people who
ruled a massive oasis region known as Khwarezm. If this doesn't sound familiar you're not alone!
Not a lot of people know about the history of Uzbekistan, a country in Central Asia.
But Koi Krylgan was a monumental complex featuring a giant tower in its center with fortified walls,
surrounded by nine additional towers and outer walls keeping the whole place safe. People had
their dwellings carved into the outer walls of the ceremonial center, where they could live
through the year. Other than the fortifications, Koi Krylgan had plenty of temples and shrines.
At the time of construction, this part of Uzbekistan was experiencing economic prosperity.
Things were going really well! Irrigation had created a fertile landscape, while caravans
moving through the region resulted in wealth through trade. Around the year 200 BC, it was
destroyed by the Apa-Saka tribe – then rebuilt. The city lasted until around 1600 years ago,
then just kind of faded into obscurity along with the rest of the region. It's in such a remote
place that its ruins weren't discovered until 1938. There were some excavations in the 1950s,
but nobody's gone back to do any scientific work here since. Would you like the opportunity to go
there and study this amazing place? 3: Prehistoric Cave Structures
Deep inside a French cave, Neanderthals constructed some of the
very first man-made structures in history. Now, we don't know much about Neanderthal
behavior. Up until recently, most people thought of Neanderthals as brainless apes who happened to
look a lot like people. But if this discovery in the French cave is anything to go on, Neanderthals
were smarter than we give them credit for. 176,000 years ago, they retreated deep into
the darkness of the Bruniquel Cave – not only in the middle of nowhere but also deep underground.
There, they built strange ring structures unlike anything archaeologists have found before.
These structures are so unique that nobody except the Neanderthals has
built anything like them in human history. But what exactly were these structures? That's
a question anthropologists would love to be able to answer. All we know right now is that they
broke stalagmites in the cave and then carried them down into its depth and arranged them in
geometric patterns. Based on the evidence of blackened stone, it looks like they then
piled wood onto their structures and lit fires. It could have been ritual behavior,
they could have been attempting to decorate their homes with fireplaces – it’s a total mystery.
To make things even more bizarre, the cave truly is almost unreachable. Spelunkers could only reach
the chamber by crawling almost vertically 100ft (30m) down through blind darkness.
It makes you wonder how primitive people carried building supplies down there over 100,000 years
ago. It's almost hard to believe! 2: Hardknott Roman Fort
In the English countryside, far from the hustle and bustle of London and the other major English
cities, there lies the Hardknott Roman Fort. It was built sometime around the year 120 AD
as a garrison for a detachment of Roman soldiers from the Dalmatian coast in Croatia. However,
the fortress was abandoned around 10 years after it was built. It was then occupied by some locals
and turned into a settlement, which they used for 200 years before abandoning it again for good.
The fortress is in the middle of nowhere, at an altitude of 800ft (244m) near the entrance
of the Hardknott Pass. Its location was almost definitely strategic, used as a gatehouse for
the Roman soldiers to watch over people moving through the pass. And it's that very isolation
that makes this such a unique archaeological site. Historians agree this was one of the most
remote Roman outposts anywhere in the United Kingdom, at the very edge of the empire. The
Roman soldiers stationed here must have thought they had been brought to the end of the world.
1: Uruk Uruk has been called the first
big city in the world. It’s nestled in a remote region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
in a land once called Mesopotamia. The first building blocks were put down somewhere around
3600 BC, or 5600 years ago. People began migrating here 400 years before the city
was built, drawn to Mesopotamia because of its rich soil and abundant crops.
Fishing was easy, there were lots of animals in the marshes, and things were just generally
good. After hundreds of years, there were enough people to build a permanent settlement.
Uruk was first excavated in 1850. Archaeologists found clay tablets written in the world’s first
script: cuneiform. The remains of an ancient temple dedicated to the sky god
An, and another temple dedicated to the love goddess Inanna. It was the people in Uruk who
first changed their clothing from simple animal skins to garments of fleece, wool, and linen.
It was also here in Uruk where simple nomads began to form the same foundations of a
society that we adhere to today. Religious leaders, an upper class, and mighty kings.
By 5000 years ago, around 50,000 people were living in Uruk and 11 more cities had sprung
up in Mesopotamia. There were stonecutters, smiths, cooks, gardeners – every profession
you can think of. It had only taken around 1000 years for a group of huts to become a
major metropolis of stone, and for primitive hunters to evolve into rulers and blacksmiths.
The city remained inhabited for another 3000 years before being abandoned around 300 CE,
then fully demolished during the Arab conquests in 634.
Which of these amazing places would you venture into the middle of nowhere to visit?
Let me know in the comments and thanks so much for watching! Remember to hit that
subscribe button and come back as soon as you can for more amazing videos. See you then, bye!